


this modern love

by entremelement



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alcohol, Bathroom Oral Sex, Explicit Language, M/M, Minor Hinata Shouyou/Kozume Kenma, Minor Yachi Hitoka/Yamaguchi Tadashi, bar meetcute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:09:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26681947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entremelement/pseuds/entremelement
Summary: “What day is it, again?”“Sunday,” Kuroo can hear his smile permeating that sentence. “It’s a Sunday.” He repeats it, sounding it out, feeling grand arson razing his bones.Kuroo Tetsurou turns "do you wanna come over and kill some time" into "I love you in the morning, when you're still hungover. I love you in the morning, when you're still strung out."
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei
Kudos: 21
Collections: Luna & Noir: KuroTsuki Fest 2020





	this modern love

**Author's Note:**

> This is an attempt to answer the question "would Kuroo and Tsukki hit it off if they met at a bar as random strangers?" Also in fulfillment of prompt #016! Title is from [this Bloc Party tune](https://open.spotify.com/track/5jFMzYXf0IIApEJBCAoaaL?si=o_ArTH10TU-8yY2qFMqjtA).
> 
> Please do mind the tags and the rating!

There are never enough words to be spoken to Kuroo Tetsurou to forbid him from nightly trips to the local watering hole. None. Perhaps not even Kenma could conjure up enough words to quench his best friend’s actual thirst. Kenma couldn’t care less about the alcoholic daze, Kuroo’s eyes glazed over, him passing out on the doormat; it’s the choice to hook up and suffer through a brief walk of shame to Kenma’s apartment that really ticks him off. 

“Kuro.” Kenma begins, with a tinge of irritation in his voice, watching as Kuroo takes careful, sluggish steps towards the _kotatsu,_ hair inconceivably messier. Afternoon glow splits his apartment into two, and very telling of how let loose Kuroo was to have caught this warm light in another apartment. If Kenma had the choice, he would have kicked him out as soon as this happened. It started innocuously, with a “hey Kenma I forgot my keys and your flat’s near the bar, so can I crash,” and Kenma not minding it one bit, but now, regret fills him to the brim. It’s not so much as the letting him crash; they’d done this as kids countless times before. It’s the way that Kuroo’s habit reeks of self-destruction, of desolation unresolved. Of countless fucks and Kenma worrying endlessly about his recklessness. He still tells himself that it’s the least he could do, at least he’d know exactly where Kuroo was.

After answering a spirited message from Hinata, Kenma starts the day thinking about what he would possibly say to a friend who’s fallen into such an irregular habit. Faintly, Kenma grunts and catches the remnants of drunkenness on Kuroo’s face, the darkness under his eyes, caked who-knows-what on the side of his face, the early hangover scowl.

“It’s Monday, Kuro. There’s a scheduled co-op stream later. _Oolong’s_ in the fridge.” There remains to be some part of Kenma that’s seething when he tears his gaze off of Kuroo, urgent strides towards his couch firmly disallowing any sort of retort. 

So Kuroo attempts to nurse a mild headache. And he simultaneously attempts to appease his gracious host. Within seconds, he’d already tripped on nothing in particular, falling with an ungraceful thud on the floorboards. For a moment, Kenma ruminates on how utterly helpless Kuroo is at present—a sluggish, drunken mess of a man who used to be able to dish out blood circulation metaphors on a whim. 

A quick beat passes both of them by, with Kenma ghosting his fingers over the controller, half-intent on helping him up, half-intent on letting him simmer in his own doing. 

Kenma settles with the latter.

He places a firm and certain grip on the controller, stoic eyes glued to the television. Kuroo blinks once, and then twice, silently cursing the sun’s glare and how his corneas seem to have acquired a momentary magnetic pull on every ray of light.

With all the energy that his body can muster, Kuroo looks up at a mildly irked Kenma, sinking in his own couch, clad in a pullover and sweats. Small circles of pink, and blue, and then burning red dance around Kuroo’s vision; strabismus or otherwise, his need to retort bests the hangover.

Irked and possessing a forthcoming scowl tugging on the corners of his face, Kenma hisses. As Kuroo’s vision gets clearer, he kicks himself off the ground and rises. “Go get yourself tested, this is the fifth time you crashed here this month.”

* * *

Not that Kuroo comes to the bar for alcohol. Far from it, even. 

There is an infinitesimal amount of care that goes into nursing his own mug of beer, in balancing himself between sobriety and absolutely horrid reckless surrender. Nights are short. His attention span, shorter. 

He struggles with forces beyond his control, everything to make him stagger doubly: the neon light bathing everything in sight with singing red, the lurching feel of glances across the floor, disheveled and sloppy fucking in the bathroom—yes, to be brief: empty trysts. With a side of alcohol.

When his messy bedhead approaches the bar’s awning, the barkeep doesn’t even bat an eye. Kuroo peeks from the small crack, the door ajar. 

The stark contrast of his black hair frozen in place, despised by gravity, as against a sea of mostly tame hair easily make him the most identifiable regular.

Kuroo takes a singular seat at the bar on the ancient swivelly chairs. These could use a bit of oiling, and this he realizes when he almost topples over as he twists himself in place. The metal screech does not bode well for him, and he transfers to the seat next to him.

“Another one of the pale ales tonight, Tetsu?” There is no hint of bashfulness with the bartender’s approach, and he continues wiping down one beer mug after another.

Kuroo props his elbow up on the bar and laughs in his closed fist. “Do I even drink anything else, Tadashi?” The bartender winces as he sets his dish towel and mug below the rack of shot glasses. “Told you not to call me Tadashi. I’ll plaster your headshot all over this bar with your number on it, man.” 

Despite his resentment, Tadashi takes a drier mug into his hand as the other assuredly grips the tap handle. Foam comes out the tap’s end and as soon as clear, dark liquid appears, he expertly catches all of it. It’s cold in his hands, and Kuroo gets a little heady when it’s expertly slid down towards him, squarely in his hand.

“Huh, that’s a perfect fit today, Yamaguchi. Hey, it’s Yamaguchi now. You better stop dishing out empty threats.” Kuroo flattens his hair with a palm, to no avail, gravity failing him yet again. He smirks into his mug when he inches it closer to his face. “At one of your best customers, even, Yamaguchi.”

At this, Yamaguchi quirks an eyebrow, not at all suspending a great disbelief. “I could throw you out on your ass at any given moment, Tetsurou. Don’t start.”

“Not as if you could,” Kuroo’s voice hitches in his throat, a grimace forming on his face. He coughs away the searing pain when alcohol goes down the wrong hatch, but, hey, it’s still cold beer, and cold beer’s what he’s here for. Or so he tells himself.

Another swig and Kuroo’s a tad cockier. “Maybe I should jump on that idea of yours, Tadashi,” Kuroo teases, setting down the mug with an audible knock on the wood-finish bar top, earning a mute squint from Yamaguchi. 

A quick-on-his-feet barkeep brandishes a paper coaster for his own woes as Kuroo nurses his. 

* * *

Consider, then, this drunkenness. How the lights blur when overthinking starts and ends abruptly. How intensely Kuroo figures that the tall blond nursing his nth bottle at the bar, as evidenced by the numerous consumed ones sitting next to his hands, is _yea cute, but not my type_. It wells up from deep within the pit of his stomach—a brimming courage or near-assholery when steps are taken towards his usual space at the bar.

As fate would have it, the mug is a mere hairbreadth away from the blond’s hands, his pale, moonlit hands. His bony, veined delicate extremities. 

Kuroo convinces himself, in the most mundane of ways—dusting himself off, wiping his sweaty-damp hands on the rough denim of his pants, recalibrating his already shaky vision—that he is defiantly, absolutely not drunk. Undrunk? Whatever. And that he’s going to try making conversation, no matter how staggering the feat of trudging back to his place was.

He shrugs the remainder of blinding bathroom fluorescents off of him when he descends further into the sea of red, faces lost in his vision. 

When Kuroo wades through the crowd, he perceives his beacon. As he absentmindedly pockets his own anxiety, he feels beer geysering back up his throat with a vengeance.

One agonizing swallow and he’s already hooked a hand atop the bar counter, a confused barkeep jumping to attention. Bodies a little too close for comfort.

“Hi. Name’s Kuroo. What’s the nomenclature forced upon you by your parental units?” Well, he tries. When he goes home and recalls this particular face, this pale moonshine blond is part of the statistical record of his failures—just another stranger. One stricken off as a failed conquest. 

Except: statistics have their way of jumping out from the collective. 

A scoff in his general direction burns into Kuroo’s short-term memory moments before it unravels itself into such sweet laughter.

“That’s new. While there’s no certainty that it is _indeed_ forced upon a mere man such as I, as nomenclature’s merely a concept contrived for convenience in consciously coordinating certain categories—it’s Kei. Tsukishima Kei.”

Kuroo reconsiders his sobriety, or lack thereof. No, he’s definitely sloshed. 

Or, consider intoxication powerful enough to rival his regular pale ales. This was probably it. 

He edges closer to meet this man’s interested gaze, to tenderly touch foreheads, to inhale each breath that comes out. Kuroo sharply takes in what’s left of the oxygen in this budding wildfire. 

“That’s a _fuckin’_ mouthful, Kei. May I?”

* * *

Underneath the bathroom glow, one that could leave you illumined for days: impatient, roaming hands shuffle underneath Kuroo’s button-on. Hurriedly, they feel the small of his back, dimples near his spine. The same bony, veined paleness maps out corners of his skin. The very hands he took and led towards him not too long ago.

The way this man’s insistence steals every bit of oxygen out of Kuroo is otherworldly. Unexpected boldness coming from the one being dragged towards a filthy bar bathroom, all coyness dissipated. 

In this manner, when Kuroo is goaded by a stranger, he forgoes all niceties. Nightly, faceless, nameless individuals find their way under Kuroo’s tall shadow. Exchanging heat, swapping spit, inhaling each other.

And then the gentle weight lifts itself off, finds itself on another. And another. And another. 

“Excited, are we, Kei?” Kuroo’s breath audibly hitches, his hands clawing at the edge of the sink when Kei ghosts fingertips slowly over his ribs. Anticipation melting what little self-control he has. Kuroo’s pointed, hazy stare upon Kei as he’s leaning against the cold of the ceramic makes everything clear: there is a concession to be made, in the unfolding of desire.

Kei knits his eyebrows together, puts firm and steady palms on Kuroo’s hips. A smirk, and he dips down on his knees, undoing Kuroo’s bottoms. A pop of a button and a tormentingly sluggish zipper pull later, he breathes slow, hot gasps at the sight of checkered boxers.

“Didn’t take you for a boxer guy, Kuroo,” Kei teases, letting his nose snag on the small of the boxer slit when he lifts his head to meet Kuroo’s scalding gaze. 

“Fuck, I-“ Kuroo breathes out to no one in particular, colors of the bar dancing in his vision. This is another one of his nightly fucks, he reminds himself. Just another one. 

Parenthetically, Kuroo finds it poetic how this new, oh so very new man, coercive and so sure of himself, can nonchalantly slide down and comment on boxers right before hooking an index finger on the hem of its waistband, the stretch of its garter. 

“Tetsurou,” he commands breathlessly, electricity surging through his body as blood rushes down, blazing a heated path in its wake. Hands clenched onto the grimy sink, head thrown back, Kuroo struggles to recall elements, equations, anything—to kick him out of his stupor. All he could do was to remember his own name. “Call me Tetsurou.”

At his behest, Kei obliges. “Tetsurou, then. Don’t mind if I do.”

It was quick, the way Kei does exactly what’s expected of him in this predicament. Kuroo perceives the arson and ravage, how Tsukishima torches everything in his path when his mouth, inconceivably warmer than fire, wraps around him. How his lips, flushed red, spells anything but a passing raze. How his palms, weighty for hands so delicate to touch, carves out a path of destruction. How his upward, steady gaze, held in place with Kuroo’s, marks all of his history and consumes it in devastation.

No fluttering lights. Only ashes. 

* * *

Hours later, Kuroo picks himself up from the drunken haze. He jumps off the stool, still heady. Marks all over the small of his thighs sting. 

“Heading home, then? Glad you made a short mess out of my bathroom again, Tetsu,” Yamaguchi glances at Kuroo and spots the familiar post-inebriation, post-sex haze. Kuroo, waving the snark off, grabs his coat on the backrest of the stool and wobbles to the door.

“Goddamn it, Tadashi,” Yamaguchi winces and expects something idiotic to come out of Kuroo’s lips next. Kuroo tilts his head back, only enough for his eyes to meet Yamaguchi. “Ever had a fucking blow so gut-rearranging, so fucking fantastic, you can see stars bursting when you close your eyes? Ever had that with Yachi?”

“Jesus, get out of my bar before I hurl one of my mugs at you, Tetsu.”

* * *

Kuroo spends the next few weeks prostrating on the floor. He’s made a home out of Kenma’s hardwood floors, dodging slight kicks that Kenma makes whenever he’s having a particularly grisly time with the _Gore Magala_ on Monster Hunter. 

He lies still when Kenma pads to the refrigerator to get oolong tea and ice, audible clinks when cubes hit the glass. Kuroo secretly revels in the sound that ice makes thereafter, and it’s very telling of what Kenma is up to when he handles the beverages: small crackling sounds upon first contact with tea. Translucent cubes swimming in brown. Kenma quietly sets a glass for him on the floor, right next to his face, before he unpauses to hear the Felynes mewl in his home. 

Kuroo is disturbed by thoughts of Kei, most days. Thinking about the tufts of platinum blonde below his line of sight, simmering, deeply, in all the ways he could ravish Kei again, if there is an _again_ to speak of, that is. 

(In his head, it’s ravage, and maybe that’s what it was, truly. An oncoming ruin. The crack of the whip waiting to be unleashed.)

What he would give to ask Kenma if he’s ever felt this way--this reckless and frankly stupid, incredibly, irrevocably cretinous desire to see someone again. To feel someone again under his fingertips, feeling all power drain from him when touch turns into an insatiable craving. 

He feels stupidly like an Etch-a-Sketch shaken beyond recognition at this point. What would he give to turn his own knobs again and repaint a picture of that--who was he? This blond. This—this dream. 

Ice drifts carefully in its own carved axis in oolong, clinking softly against the glass. Kuroo takes one good look at it and sees nothing but condensation. Heat forming its path, even on cold surfaces. 

A drop sticks to another, and it gets too heavy for its own body that it slides a short path down the glass. It breaks its surface tension on the floor, adds to the puddle underneath. 

If Kuroo waits until all the ice’s melted, water would reach him.

But he allows it, lets the cold of it to inch slowly towards his skin. Cold on hot. A recollection: fingers on skin. Hands in hair. Guttural moans. Humming vibrations all over him when he comes. 

* * *

The next time Kuroo spots Kei, he’s sitting alone at the bar on a particularly calm Sunday night. It’s always a Sunday, of course, it’s always going to be a Sunday whenever he sees a vision. Especially with the neon lights and the dim bar backdrop, it becomes painfully easy for tunnel vision to set in.

Kuroo swiftly slides next to Kei and takes his seat quietly. Yamaguchi eyes him with a vengeance, then subtly gives Kei a pointed gaze. When Kei looks to the right, away from their telepathic banter, Yamaguchi mouths ‘ _isn’t he the one you..’_ before pointing to the far end of the room in small motions, nudging his finger against an open palm, as if a wall, as if it’s enough to hide his motions from Kei. ‘ _In the bathroom?’_

With a lopsided grin, he answers in the best way he knows how.

“Guchi, gimme a Blue Moon today, huh?” Creases on Kuroo’s button-on stretch themselves out when he sits up in attention, eagerly anticipating Kei's reaction. Yamaguchi grunts and reaches for a cold one from the tall refrigerator. 

Sure enough, Kei turns to face the source of that voice. 

"Hey, stranger," Kei says, voice soft enough to be drowned out by all the _HONNE_ songs Yamaguchi put on. It seems as his default setting is set to max scowl, because despite the beckoning softness, his eyebrows are still knitted. But then his lips curl into a small smile and Kuroo resists the urge to clutch his chest and form more wrinkles on his shirt. 

As soon as his eyes catch that slight smile, Kuroo gives Kei a lopsided one in reply. “Fancy seeing your lovely face here. Wanna have a go at it,” he cocks his head to the side ever so slightly, towards the bathroom. “Again?”

Yamaguchi slides a paper coaster right in front of Kuroo, crisp _Heineken_ lettering on it flush against the glossy countertop. A brown bottle with an orange wedge half-stuffed in its mouth is set on it with a thud, and Yamaguchi grimaces before scuttling away to attend to other regulars. 

Even then, the intensity of Kuroo's pointed gaze didn't falter, nor did his eyes linger elsewhere. Without so much as a glance towards the bottle's direction, he grabs it by the neck and pushes the jammed orange wedge in with an index finger, fizz bubbling up slightly. 

"I don't want to be the one to point this out, but," Kei starts, and Kuroo takes a swig, beer tasting both delightfully bitter and citrusy on his tongue. "Are you homeless, Tetsurou? Offer me a go at your damn apartment, not the loo." 

Laughter rumbles from deep within Kuroo, and it aches to be let out. It’s one thing to recall their tryst with such pointed haughtiness, but it’s certainly another when Kuroo struggles to fling the idea of grabbing Kei by the waist and taking him on the counter then and there out the window. Kuroo settles with the latter instead.

"Bold." 

"You still owe me, you know." Fire starts in Kei’s eyes and Kuroo welcomes it, lets it snake an erratic, scalding path through him.

* * *

That morning, Kuroo wakes to find himself in his own sheets, biceps sticky with sweat, the absence of a well-timed hangover, and his hair sticking out in different directions.

It was an ordinary day. And it was so jarring to him.

It _should_ be ordinary, it should: waking up in your own bed, not nursing a hangover, not fucking anyone in the bathroom the night before, not struggling with emptiness the day after. 

But it’s decidedly not, and it’s eerie. Much too ominous for Kuroo, this regularity. When things are _this_ straightforward, Kuroo remembers Murphy’s Law with a vengeance. 

Kuroo fails to accept it, but it is what it is. Today, it’s just Kuroo Tetsurou, your ordinary not-drunk, not-hungover guy, rousing himself up gently from his ordinary eight-hour sleep, ordinarily.

He props himself up, planting two elbows on the bed. When he inspects his room, everything certainly is ordinary. There’s still the semi-tattered periodic table hanging over his desk. If the windows were open and the blinds drawn, he could feel the specific mild burn of the eight o’clock sun on his skin, and he knows how valuable that could be as vitamin D. Kuroo knows how bright it was outside despite not being able to see it. He almost feels the Tokyo humidity on his skin, almost hears the cicadas chirping in sonic layers, unfurling their wings and rousing everyone from slumber within a kilometer’s radius.

He zooms in on himself and checks whether or not he’s lost a limb or two; this feels like a contrived zombie movie, the calm before the storm. 

Underneath the covers, he’s still in red and green checkered boxers, the only clothing on him. He checks his body and wonders how he got here or if he’s missing a limb, but stops short when he sees a leg slung over his. 

As if on cue, someone stirs under the sheets next to him. His eyes follow the trail of where this leg could lead to. _Sometimes_ , he recalls his mother saying, _some of the best things, we find out of our own utter curiosity._

What has his curiosity brought him this time, then? 

“Tetsurou, mm,” it says, sleep ever so present in the raspy, morning voice. A blond tuft, still as lovely in the dark of his room, shows up from underneath the duvet. “What day is it, again?”

It’s then that he curls his lips up into a smile, mentally crumpling the contrived list of conquests and throwing it into a bin in the dark corners of his mind, someplace where synapses could no longer reach it, nor attempt to transmit it.

“Sunday,” Kuroo can hear his smile permeating that sentence. “It’s a Sunday.” He repeats it, sounding it out, feeling grand arson razing his bones. 

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey, creators are revealed! Hi. It's me. Had a ton of fun playing Sunday by Bloc Party on repeat as I'm writing some of the scenes on here. 
> 
> As with all of my fics, this one comes with an accompaniment playlist. Give it a listen [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5js23MAdyf8ByWxIGB49lU?si=C0EM6L5mSyCZahEFMEMNZw).
> 
> I'm also on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/entremelement) if you'd like to say hi! Thanks for reading!


End file.
